During our Post Conference Sprint in Karlsruhe we opted for a brainstorming based Neos team workshop instead of our usual in person retrospective.
The discussions quickly focused on these topics:
Team member activity and communication
Team meetings: They did have less and less attendance in the past and the last summary on discuss was posted in 2023.
Are our time slots still good suited for us?
Why did we stop documenting our meetings? People who can’t attend relied on those documentations to keep in touch with whats happening
We have 4 regular meetings during the week (Tuesday team meeting, Wednesday team meeting, Wednesday Marketing weekly, Friday Neos 9 weekly)
The friday weekly has a good structure and regular attendance. Let’s keep this up
Idea: Ask our team members about new time slots
Idea: monthly blog post and/or newsletter about “what happened in the project” (our marketing team has this already on their task list)
Team activity:
It’s sometimes unclear, especially for decision-making, who is active at the moment or who is currently unavailable but will be active again in the foreseeable future.
We want to show, that beeing a Neos team member doesn’t have to be associated with coding. Therefore, we might want to add roles / tasks or interests regarding the Neos project to our team page.
Idea: Regular quarterly team meetings in a larger group.
Idea: Create an semi-annual opt-in poll to determine who is currently active
Idea: Show inactive members in a dedicated section on neos.io
Appreciation of our contributors
We want to continue naming of contributors in releases. Major, minor and bugfix releases.
There are people who contribute regularly and don’t want to be part of the team - how do we honour that?
Idea: Create a concept for “Core Contributors”
We need to continuously highlight, that contribution is not only about coding.
For example, the Neos team itself does not only consist of developers.
Look into options for a centralised rights management (@robert)
Proposal for team member and/or contributor help icon (@bwaidelich)
Follow ups
As we had limited time to discuss everything in detail, some topics we will need to address in further dedicated meetings:
Do we have a clear overview in the Neos Team which tasks we have to take on? Are there any blank spots we need to address and/or can we enable people to help us with?
We might want to reconsider what the structure and goal of our team meeting is. Maybe its not as clear at the moment as it should be?
2. Do you still see yourself as an active core team member?
TODO: add description text
Answer selection:
Yes, I’m actively contributing with the capacity I have.
Yes, but I’m struggling with my contribution. Please let us know details below.
No currently not. Please mark me as temporarily inactive.
No, but I see myself rather as an active Core Contributor.
No, please remove me from the team.
3. What would make it easier for you to contribute to the team?
4. We want restructure the team page on neos.io. Therefore, we would like to know: What the three main topics that you contribute to the Neos project and its community?
5. Is there anything else you want to tell us about?
I mostly stopped attending weeklies, there are often long discussion on specific issues, lots of insider stuff, and it felt more productive to do other things with that time. For me currently deep work on where the role of LLMs in CMS will be.
I never found the meeting summaries very helpful. I would find it extremely helpful to have an (ai-based) summary with jump markers and a video recording. That way, I could see the 10% of the meeting that is really interesting to me (e.g. discussion of a specific bug I care about, or some UI topic), and maintaining a rough overview of what’s happening in the teams (the 90%).
Yes this is exactly the discussion we touched as the meeting ended. And I myself can‘t shake the feeling that more of us might actualy see it that way.
We had a similar problem in fridays weekly and evolved it‘s structure to a general and a deep dive section.
I was struggeling, if it make sence to figure out a new time slot now. As mostly the feedback afterwards was more an issue of the meeting itself (content, participants, etc) and not about the timeslot.
I had the feeling we need to determine the purpose of the team meeting (social?, alignment?, progess?, …) before we try to find a proper timeslot, which might be different for different purposes.
In today’s weekly we discussed some of the topics above, especially in light because no major changes happened so far.
@markusguenther wants to help to kickoff a opt-In activity poll for once and we also came up with a good question that rather focuses on keeping members in the team instead of attempting to forcefully divide anything which we dont want: “How to you want to support the Neos Team in the next year / What are your next plans with Neos”
Additionally we discussed that once we have established an accepted team member listing, we want to reopen the discussion regarding the weekly meeting times.
Also not all team members seem to participate in votings and the problem is that its unknown if a voting is valid or not. A possible idea is to make a list of members where they state their vote will be “expected” so we are sure we dont miss out on any votes and can better judge a result for granting funding for example.
Recently we also had the discussion that using slack to reach all team members does not always work - for example if slack is not used in the agency - this might warrant an discussion as well because its essential to have a way to reach all team members for votings or just generally!
For the meetings, I’m even more convinced that it would be cool to record them, more like a “community hour”, I would probably watch many of them when I e.g. walk home from work. And I think many non-core members that want to get started and dive in the systems would do. This would also solve the problem of meeting notes, AI can create reliable summaries that are good jumping points into the parts of the video.
Hijacking this… I looked into Zitadel to replace our aging Atlassian Crowd setup. That would be a basis for any other system to connect to it. In the past we had Jenkins and Neos to do SSO against Crowd, right now it’s only Discourse (via our own id.neos.io).
The end result could be this, given we see value:
flowchart RL
Z("Zitadel")
T("neos.io Teams page")
J("Jenkins")
I("id.neos.io")
D("Discourse")
M("Mautic")
N("neos.io")
E("E-mail")
N <--> Z
I <--> Z
T <--> I
J <--> Z
D <--> I
M <--> Z
E <--> Z
Right now, my focus is to make this a reality:
flowchart RL
Z("Zitadel")
T("neos.io Teams page")
I("id.neos.io")
D("Discourse")
I <--> Z
T <--> I
D <--> I
Because that is something we need to do (because all Discourse users “live there”) and Crowd is a dead horse.
And then go from there with what we consider useful.
I took the task from the list and wrote down some thoughts on what the contributor benefits could be.
It is a document in our Nextcloud and you are welcome to add some notes.
Regarding discuss, I also thought about trust level four (still under moderator level), but then you are able to write private mails to users, and I am not sure if we want that.
The criteria for this role are also open for discussion. Therefore, what do we expect from community members before we ask them if they want to join the group of an official contributor? (Alternatively, do we not ask and simply assign the role as a surprise?)
Additionally, do we need a criteria to remove the privilege?
To be honest, I find it hard to define a strict criterion to join as a contributor. Because contribution cannot just be code, which would be easy to count. And say, for instance, the contributor needs 5 successful merge requests or needs to comment 25 times in Slack to help people.
Of course, everything could be measured somehow, but as a contribution can be so different for me, it is difficult to write down a sketch of rules.
I tried my best to write down some rules, but if we want to put numbers on the list, then please help me to roll the dice
The sprint in Vienna is close, and when I see it correctly, we have the following action items left.
Proposal for team member and/or contributor help icon
Create a poll to figure out new time slot(s) for our team meetings
Create a regular Opt-In activity poll for Neos Team members
TBH, I don’t know what the icon was for, but I was not part of the retro that time. Do we want to have Slack polls or use the Nextcloud and just reference to the polls in Slack?
Last time it turned out, that the time slot is not the issue itself. Rather the meaning and the content of the team meeting. So we should first of all define that first and than come up with the time slots.
An suggestion by @ahaeslich was to have two different time slots alternating on a weekly basis (e.g. one before noon and one in the afternoon). So (hopefully) everybody could join at least every two weeks.
In team Tiga, we had a kind of classical kanban daily in the first 15 minutes, and we wrote down that as notes. The notes also got feedback in discussion sporadically from none team members.
After that round, we talked about other topics, and people could also leave the meeting after that. In my opinion, that worked quite well, and we always had a good attendance. We had the time slot from the current optional meeting on Wednesday.
Idea: Ask our team members about new time slots
